Migration

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Edited by

Nav Nagra

I have never migrated. Not in the traditional sense anyway. My feet have more or less stayed on the same ground. I do, however, come from those who have migrated. From my grandfather who left India to find new life in England. From my mother who left that life in England to come to Canada to meet my father who had migrated from India to see what the other side of the world could offer. These movements inevitably shaped the person I would become. The person I would migrate into.

In Arielle Spence’s interview with Ann Y.K. Choi, we get to explore the complicated relationship of gender roles, family dynamics, and racism that forms the character Mary in Choi’s acclaimed novel Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, and the ways in which migration forms our movements as individuals.

Migration is much more than people moving from place to place. It can be the movement of our society into a world where population decay and longer life spans change the way society behaves (page 68). It can be the migration from youth to an older age (page 22) and the need to move, as we all have come to see in recent history, in order to survive (page 28).

Thus, we all experience migration differently and I wanted to be sure to represent as many instances as possible of the complexity that is migration. So, it is with this thought process that this issue was created. I hope you enjoy it.

Writing

Every now and then I catch it: a cluster of motes, a brown gathering at the tops of my cheekbones, age spots; grey hairs shot through with light, fibre-optic electric in the fluorescent glow of a grotty bathroom; the fleshy syncopation of my upper arm, waving a half-beat behind my hand. I feel it like I feel the geese, migrating: somehow I am in the sweet late summer of this young body, and I just want to fuck you with it.

Interviews

In January 2017, Arielle Spence spoke with Ann Y.K. Choi about her debut novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety. Kay’s—which was a finalist for the 2016 Toronto Book Award—charts the coming-of-age of Mary, a Korean Canadian teenager living in Toronto in the 1980s. Over the course of the conversation, Ann spoke about lessons learned from teenagers; motherhood and migration; discovering one’s agency; a Handbook for Debut Novelists; and practicing gratitude.

Nav Nagra, who has been an editorial board member and the advertising coordinator at Room since 2014, will be editing an upcoming issue of the magazine on migration. Nav has written poetry and reviews for Project Space, Sad Magazine, Lemon Hound, Room, and the New Vancouver Poets Folio. Kayi Wong spoke to Nav about why she chose migration as a theme, and how reading submissions have changed the way she reads and writes.